Social Media

Update: Joel Comm (who had been out of town) responded to this post and the numerous retweets (thanks again to everyone who helped!) by killing the frame and keeping the rest of the features that make TwitPwr a an interesting URL shortener. Joel stated that the frame isn’t

“the primary purpose of Twitpwr and not an important feature to me. I instructed our dev to remove.” and “thanks for pointing it out.”

Joel, you’re more than welcome. I appreciate the quick response and hopefully the trend of sites like Digg and TwitPwr accommodating content publisher’s rights will continue.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce TwitPwr.com.

As you can see in the image above, the site is yet another URL shortening “service” that frames other sites’ content.

I’ve written fairlyextensively recently about the evils of this practice (known as framejacking) so I’m not going to rehash all those points here. But just so we’re all clear, framing another site’s content without the owner’s permission, is theft.

So, when I stumbled across TwitPwr today I was shocked. Not because another site was framejacking, but because the site is owned and operated by well known internet marketer Joel Comm!

In covering the Diggbar controversy I’ve been confronted several times with the question of “What’s the big deal?” or even that only SEO’s care about it.

While there are certainly SEO concerns, content producers (read as bloggers, podcast producers, video producers, artists, and just about anyone with a website) across the web should be up in arms whether they care about SEO or not. Why? Because at the heart of this issue is one small question with some BIG implications…

Who owns the content?

To illustrate my point, look at the image I’ve created below:

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, that’s 5, count them 5 layers of framing on top of the content’s source!

Update: Digg implemented changes earlier this week which drastically improves the Diggbar. Users who are not logged in to Digg (most importantly search engines) will no longer see the Diggbar, they will instead encounter a 301 redirect which is the SEO friendly way to redirect pages.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com does a videocast called Diggnation and just a couple weeks back he discovered that someone was framing HIS content. His reaction?

In light of the much publicized release of the Diggbar, which essentially places a Digg frame around your content, the discussion beginning at the 32 minute would seem to be a bit embarrassing for the Digg founder.